With the changes in the patchset we are presenting icons in several colors at the same time which may be too distracting:

If I understand the original design intent correctly (@violetto may want to add more details), the goal was to present the user a list of options and provide some additional feedback for users about the specific action they are going to take. For example, If I want to delete a topic, the action label (icon and text) will turn red to reinforce the idea that data will be destroyed.

By moving these information upfront, we are communicating information even for actions users may not be interested. I don't see a reason to increase the level of prominence for that information.

If we are really not able to change colors, I'd go with making icons and labels grey instead of setting a fixed color for the icons. However, I wonder, are we really not able to support icons in multiple colors? Some thoughts about that:

When reading about the change I was wondering why is this change proposed in the first place, I'd would expect the this Phabricator ticket to contain more details about that (maybe the discussion is elsewhere and I missed it).

I can imagine a preference for the use of SVGs instead of webfonts (a lot has been writen on the internet about pros and cons of each approach), but are there any plans to support multiple color icons with the option that SVG provides (multiple assets, embedded SVGs modified through CSS, using Less to replace colors in URL-encoded SVGs)? Here is a quick example of the later, but I'm not sure how much effort would require for ResourceLoader to be able to support something like that. Is there a Phabricator ticket to discuss this?

We want to use the icon set that's already in OOUI, rather than maintaining our own set of icons separately; we want to use the same technology as everyone else; and SVGs are data-URI-embeddable whereas icon fonts are not, which enabled us to write a ResourceLoader integration for them.

And then there's things like this :(

but I'm not sure how much effort would require for ResourceLoader to be able to support something like that. Is there a Phabricator ticket to discuss this?

It shouldn't be too difficult to support this in OOUI / RLImageModule. We already support changing icon colors based on CSS classes, that's what we currently use, right now you just can't do it on hover without using JS. I'll file a task.

We want to use the icon set that's already in OOUI, rather than maintaining our own set of icons separately; we want to use the same technology as everyone else; and SVGs are data-URI-embeddable whereas icon fonts are not, which enabled us to write a ResourceLoader integration for them.

We also had a big meeting about this and explicitly decided to use SVG for web. (There are definitely advantages to web fonts as well, but it was decided to use SVG for some of the reasons Roan states). The web font advantages are not compelling enough to re-decide this.

And then there's things like this :(

This is the first I've heard of this. Where is that happening and why?

I agree that we should have a global proper way to represent "Loading" state, but until we have something like that, we need to be very careful in this case. The wikiglyph in question isn't just being used as-is, it's also being rotated in CSS to produce the animation - something I am not too sure would be that easy to do to an ooui icon. We should find a solution first before we erase the behavior now, either way.